Screen-space color bouncing

While working on my Occlusionist plug-in I stumbled across an interesting side-effect of generating ambient occlusion in screen-space: It’s possible to achieve computationally expensive global illumination effects such as color bouncing in the same way!

And what’s best… it comes pretty much for free!

As it turns out, when processing ambient occlusion the Occlusionist is already doing everything required to achieve color-bouncing, so it’s simple enough to call the source image’s color and bounce that around to simulate a nice final gather or global illumination effect right in After Effects.

The overhead is somewhere around 10-20%, which is totally acceptable when you consider that true 3D global illumination effects generally take much, much longer to render.

Having access to screen-space ambient occlusion plus color bouncing right within After Effects will certainly make for some very interesting effects and opens a whole new world of possibilities!